Bringing people together and finding common ground with our community feels more important that ever. Climate conversations have a big role to play in helping people to feel a sense of agency and hope for the future of their neighbourhoods so I was pleased to share some thoughts on this at the launch of Climate Barometer’s Signal the Noise report. Here’s what I said:
So I’d like to start by talking about my neighbour, Tim. He’s retired, he walks his dog every morning and he enjoys a crafty fag on the front porch. He isn’t convinced of climate change, he hates heat pumps but he absolutely loves wind turbines – and he’s exactly the kind of person we need to engage if we want to build support for climate action.
Tim isn’t interested in a lecture but he’s always, always up for a chat.
And this is why we run Let’s Talk Climate, which is training for people who want to start climate conversations in their communities.
Because all the evidence shows that conversations are a big deal, on everything from values to voting behaviour.
They were the biggest driver of the massive shift in public opinion on equal marriage. They played a pivotal role in the abortion referendum in Ireland. They’re what determine which issues are salient come election time
And we think they can do the same for climate – above all because they’re so good at engaging the ‘persuadables’, the people in the middle of the political spectrum whom we most need to engage to bring about political tipping points.
The climate sector hasn’t always been brilliant at speaking to these people. It’s so easy to fall into ‘megaphone’ mode when there’s so much at stake. But as the writer Amanda Ripley says ‘People need to feel heard before they will listen’ – and this idea is at the heart of our training.
When we started three years ago we asked people who care about climate change what was stopping them from starting conversations about it and the same answers came back over and over: I don’t want to sound preachy, I don’t have all the facts, I don’t want to come across as a hypocrite, I don’t know how to start.
Our training – a two hour online workshop followed by a 6-week peer support group – addresses these issues head on . Which is why listening, connecting, and asking curious questions are absolutely crucial to our approach.
We’ve now trained more than a thousand people from big national membership orgs like UNISON and the Women’s Institute, campaign groups like the Wildlife Trusts and Parents for Future and local climate action groups from Devon to Yorkshire.
We’ve found that there’s a huge appetite for this work, not just among the organisations we work with but above all among their members and supporters. We’ve been very deliberate about designing ways for people to build camaraderie and common purpose and it’s clear to us that people absolutely love the connection they feel to others holding the same fears and that THIS is what keeps them coming back week after week.
Once we let people know that their job isn’t to persuade, but to ask questions and listen, the relief in the room is palpable. Inviting people to have a conversation with a neighbour feels like the sweet spot between transactional asks like ‘give us a fiver a month and sign this petition’ and huge asks like ‘please glue yourself to this road’.
The feedback has been fantastic. 95% of people who complete the 6-week Challenge – where they support each other as they practise their conversation skills out ‘in the wild’ – tell us that they feel more ready to talk about climate change with a wider range of people, including people they don’t expect to share their views.
Take Harri, who works for Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust. She lives in a rural village which is currently up in arms over a proposed solar farm. Harri could have kept quiet about her support for it and moaned about her neighbours at work but instead, after taking part in the Challenge, she started to have climate conversations in her local pub over a series of Friday nights. She found much more support for nature than she was expecting – and her bravery helped to bring climate change right into the heart of village life.
And conversations like this are brilliant for generating local insights, too. It turns out that when you listen to people, they tell you stuff! All this intel is already being shared between these small groups of campaigners, and we want to get even better at capturing it so that we can give people’s stories a bigger platform and use them to help inform national campaigns too.
One final thing from me. Larger Us is a tiny org – you’re currently looking at 50% of the payroll – and we know we can’t build a climate conversations movement on our own. We see ourselves as a learning lab, testing stuff out and sharing what we learn with the partners and sectors we work with. For us, the real impact of our work is all about inspiring other, bigger organisations to start building conversations into the way they do campaigning, particularly on local issues – so if you’re interested in finding out more, then my DMs are very much open to anyone here who feels like this might be a path they want to go down!